What I don't understand is: if you're going to host something like Parler, knowing that it is extremely controversial, why wouldn't you host it yourselves? The money they would have saved over using AWS (at the scale quoted in the previous comments) could have paid for the servers and the people to manage them. I suppose the deplatformers would have just gone after whatever data center they used, though, or if they'd have setup shop in their garage, then the ISP they used. It's turtles all the way down. My point is that I can't wrap my head around the fact that everyone is just assumed to use a cloud provider now, and the act of racking your own servers and managing your own proxies and firewalls seems to be a dead art.

Probably same reason everyone else uses cloud services. They're just way easier, faster and cheaper if you don't have the engineering capacity in-house. I'm sure they're pivoting to self-hosting right now, but it could easily be 2 months of frantic work to get back online with a system that can only handle a fraction of the traffic. And I'm sure they get hit with DDoS attacks 8 days a week.

I totally agree with you. I run the data science department at a corporation and we do most things on our laptops (I have a mobile workstation) or on our in-house server. Most data science teams seem to be moving to cloud. We've saved a lot of money and awkward conversations with accounting about why we're using so much computing power for so many hours a day. I don't bat an eye at running something overnight that has a high chance of failing.

Back to the topic at hand, Parler dedicated itself to being a place where people could say alt-right things. How did they not price in the risk of getting booted by AWS? Even estimating a 5% chance should have convinced them to self-host.

> why wouldn't you host it yourselves

Running a datacenter, especially at scale, is expensive as hell. Cloud is also expensive, but in return you get the ability to not need to think about hardware anymore. Prior to last week they probably assumed that AWS et. al. wouldn't have just suddenly cut them off, so they didn't factor in that risk except as a distant possibility. Up until a week ago we all were scared of FAATG's power after all and people were still talking about breaking them up.

> Running a datacenter, especially at scale, is expensive as hell.

I helped build one out, which was later acquired, but I wouldn't think it would take more than a couple of cages of equipment in a colo facility to host Parler, especially in these relatively early days. Maybe I'm completely out of touch.

I suppose it depends on what their backend actually looks like. Someone quoted in the data leak thread that they spent ~300k/mo on AWS which suggests they're definitely past a few cages of equipment. Who knows though, AWS charges insane rates for the privilege of not needing to think about hardware and making trivial difficult problems like establishing geographic presence or redundancy across datacenters. Parler is probably going to eventually need to self host anyways though, and then we'll see what a popular website will look like when it goes back to doing things the old fashioned way.

They were a startup at heart, and what dev with access to millions of dollars will be interested in running some enterprise VM solution over the shiny toys you get by using AWS or GCP?

> knowing that it is extremely controversial

Aside from it being sad that supporting free speech is controversial, if we assume good faith in the founders' statements then the controversy is simply the way the media has highlighted a section of the user base. Have you been on there? I haven't but I've been around long enough not to rely on the media for accurate representations of groups on the internet (or much else, to be honest.)

yeah look at the recent dumps and insight into moderation and it's quite clear supporting "free speech" was smoke and mirrors. combined w/ the security lapses it's pretty jarring.

I don't look at dumps of other's personal data, and I haven't heard about the moderation - please, without revealing anyone's private data - would you enlighten me?

yea it sounds like a reasonable IT person at Parler would suggest preparing for getting booted off these big tools (aws, twilio, etc.) considering Parler sounds like exactly the type of product that would get kicked off these services.

One of the founders of pirate bay had a tweetstorm recently where he was like, i get that aws kicked u guys off, but like, u guys cant get a homepage up and running? I agree with this guy.

parlor was founded with politics in mind, maybe they are ok with shutting down their community because in a way that serves their political goals, sounds like parlor and aws are already suing eachother, i dont doubt uber-conservative users will find an alternative platform to use in the coming weeks.

I was thinking about it this morning. They probably didn't have an easy time finding new employees too because of the nature and controversy associated with the site, potentially part of the reason for lack of moderation.

Not defending, just observing. It's interesting from a business/development perspective when it comes to rapid scale and team size.

> They probably didn't have an easy time finding new employees too because of the nature and controversy associated with the site, potentially part of the reason for lack of moderation.

Maybe, but I would wager that there are a lot of tech people who sympathize explicitly with the people that Parler is trying to attract, and an even larger contingent who would work there under the auspices of protecting what they believe is the right to free speech, etc.

Setting aside moral qualms for a moment, the engineering problems they're having right now are probably one-in-a-career problems, so it would be interesting work, without a doubt.

> They probably didn't have an easy time finding new employees too because of the nature and controversy associated with the site, potentially part of the reason for lack of moderation.

Parler established itself as a "free speech" social network platform. Part of its objective, based on that principle, was minimal or no moderation. Ironically, of course, they banned many people who came in with left-wing views. Which means they actually worked to create the extremist bubble that is now causing them problems with others.

Do you need to have many technical staff if you are renting your infrastructure? The scaling part probably is mostly handled by AWS so most of the the people there are working on product development, which shouldn’t require that many people since it’s just another social media software.

I would guess that they spend quite a bit of resources on content moderation tools development as this is the bespoke part of their business.